In this episode: Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle, how I escaped a cult, why we must care about others, and how it can all be applied to persuasion, art creation, ideology, and modern life. We delve into some of the philosophical reasons behind what makes one “good” at rhetoric. I talk about how some of Lacan’s, Freud’s, and Jung’s psychological writings can be used to cultivate authority, humanity, and logic. As I explain each pillar of the triangle, I’ll then use that same method to analyze my own life to give a better idea of who I am: my ethos of what led me to co-found Jam Street Media, the pathos of my grandmother’s imperative to me, and the logos of the book that caused my exodus from religion. My Photography - www.instagram.com/faseycranco My Twitter - www.Twitter.com/faseycranco My Website - CaseyFranco.com Jam Street Media - JamStreetMedia.com Suggest a topic: godsmastersandclout@gmail.com Chapters - 00:56 - Episode Introduction 4:20 - The Rhetorical Triangle 14:40 - Ethos (The Concept) 30:55 - My Ethos (What I’m Credible to Speak On) 39:24 - Pathos (The Concept) 55:16 - My Pathos (How My Grandmother Sees Me) 1:00:10 - Logos (The Concept) 1:12:45 - My Logos (Using Logic to Escape a Cult) 1:29:53 - The Wrap-up Links and Citations - School of Liberal Arts Rhetorical Triangle Analysis - https://www.lsu.edu/hss/english/files/university_writing_files/item35402.pdf Salvoj Zizek on Gratification of Capitalist Consumption - https://youtu.be/P18UK5IMRDI Manipulation vs Persuasion by Michael Roberts - https://medium.com/@michaelwroberts/the-difference-between-persuasion-and-manipulation-27eb4c02fd2d Meerkat Facts - https://www.natgeokids.com/au/discover/animals/general-animals/meerkat-facts/ Social Contract Theory - https://iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/ Michael Heumer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey Liberalism - https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/244/ Stanley Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience and Authority - https://www.sparknotes.com/psychology/psych101/socialpsychology/section7/ How to understand power - Eric Liu - https://youtu.be/c_Eutci7ack Lacan’s “Big Other” - http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/terms/other.html Freud’s “Superego” - https://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html Sam Harris on Freewill and Genetic determinism - https://samharris.org/the-illusion-of-free-will/ Lacan on Desire - https://www.lacanonline.com/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-about-desire/ Zizek on the lack of a “Big Other” - "What is the big other?" - The Pervert's Guide To Ideology 2012 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwIDNW89AqQ Turlock’s churches - https://townsquarepublications.com/turlock-worship/ Videos I made for iHeart - Lacan on “The Subject” - http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/terms/subject.html Empathy - https://lesley.edu/article/the-psychology-of-emotional-and-cognitive-empathy#:~:text=According%20to%20Hodges%20and%20Myers,but%20without%20the%20self%20actually Effects of the Agricultural Revolution - https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory2/chapter/effects-of-the-agricultural-revolution/#:~:text=The%20increase%20in%20agricultural%20production,loosely%20regulated%20agricultural%20market%2C%20and Yuval Noah Harari on Human Superiority - https://ideas.ted.com/why-humans-run-the-world/ Lacan’s “Signifiers” - https://nosubject.com/Signifier Reptile Brain vs Mammalian Brain - https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d_05_cr_her.html Genetic predisposition vs Experience - https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-nature-versus-nurture-2795392 Structuralism - Calhoun, Craig, ed. 2002. "Structuralism." In Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN9780195123715. Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/588138.The_Hero_With_a_Thousand_Faces David Hume’s Moral Philosophy - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/ Lacan’s “Signifiers” - https://nosubject.com/Signifier Lacan’s “The Real” - https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/definitions/real.html Priming - https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/priming Carl Jung on “The Stages of Life” - https://www.philosophicalsociety.com/archives/Carl%20Jung's%20Stages%20of%20Life.htm Initiations into Adulthood - https://robertmoore-phd.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.display&page_id=35 Inductive vs Deductive Reasoning - https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/inductive-deductive-reasoning/ The Scientific Method - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/ Rationalism vs Empiricism - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/ Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetico-deductive_model Science and Absolute Truth - https://bit.ly/3bG4VAw The Validity of The Theory of Evolution - https://www.globaltruthproject.com/single-post/the-present-truth-about-life?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIjY6Jtt7c6wIVl4WRCh3AcgsjEAAYASAAEgKNsfD_BwE Philosophy Tube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8NVy00tfdI Crime Correlates Poverty - https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=242128 How race corresponds to poverty - https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Pathways_SOTU_2017_poverty.pdf The Lies of “The Bell Curve” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo SFX and Music - GMaC Theme by Camille Stennis Americana Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Ancient Rite Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Kalimba Relaxation Music Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Sonatina in C Minor performed by Kevin MacLeod
In this episode: Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle, how I escaped a cult, why we must care about others, and how it can all be applied to persuasion, art creation, ideology, and modern life. We delve into some of the philosophical reasons behind what makes one “good” at rhetoric. I talk about how some of Lacan’s, Freud’s, and Jung’s psychological writings can be used to cultivate authority, humanity, and logic. As I explain each pillar of the triangle, I’ll then use that same method to analyze my own life to give a better idea of who I am: my ethos of what led me to co-found Jam Street Media, the pathos of my grandmother’s imperative to me, and the logos of the book that caused my exodus from religion.
My Photography - www.instagram.com/faseycranco
My Twitter - www.Twitter.com/faseycranco
My Website - CaseyFranco.com
Jam Street Media - JamStreetMedia.com
Suggest a topic: godsmastersandclout@gmail.com
Chapters -
00:56 - Episode Introduction
4:20 - The Rhetorical Triangle
14:40 - Ethos (The Concept)
30:55 - My Ethos (What I’m Credible to Speak On)
39:24 - Pathos (The Concept)
55:16 - My Pathos (How My Grandmother Sees Me)
1:00:10 - Logos (The Concept)
1:12:45 - My Logos (Using Logic to Escape a Cult)
1:29:53 - The Wrap-up
Links and Citations -
SFX and Music -
GMaC Theme by Camille Stennis
Americana Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Ancient Rite Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Kalimba Relaxation Music Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Sonatina in C Minor performed by Kevin MacLeod
Do you ever feel like a puppet on a string, like a piece of paper constantly being blown about by the winds of life, do your idols and role models constantly let you down. And when you try to create art to express yourself, does it seem to fall on deaf ears? Alternatively, do you often feel like the smartest person in a room or like everyone around you is simply a cog in a huge machine while you appear to be the only one who is self-aware.
On the show today, I'm going to break down some concepts to help you uncover what invisible forces may be shaping your life and how you can use those same methods to improve your own artistic expression and your ability to practice empathy. And eventually change minds so that you never have to feel like you're just yelling into the void again.
Hello everyone. And welcome to God's masters and cloud three things you can live without. My name is Casey Franco and before I get started, I want to talk about the meaning and purpose of the show itself. I wanted to show it an exploration of some of the complexities of life that get overlooked. There's a lot of people in the world today who seem lost or overwhelmed with questions to the point where they feel like they're drowning while others seem to be Oh, completely sure of themselves without any consideration for outside opinion.
Even when they are provably wrong. I'm not going to pretend that I found all the answers, but my journey through life has given me a unique perspective on how to at least go looking for the answers. And I'm going to try to share what I've discovered here. I'll go into this more towards the end of this episode, but the title of the show is a reference to the Antarctic slogan.
No gods, no masters. This is not just a rejection of authoritarian entities. It's a declaration of autonomy. We will not be controlled by those who speak for us, be them oppressive regimes or indoctrinating ideologies. Through my own perspective, I felt compelled to tack on clout to this phrase, because I think it's so perfectly exemplifies the tangible drive of our modern consumerist culture.
Sure. God is dead. And the U S is land of the free, but if you're still a slave to the confines of what I'll simply call here, cloud chasing. Are you truly free? The siren song of power by way of owning things can be just as detrimental to a good life as the cult or the autocratic. So in every episode, I'll start with a common idea or question or phenomenon of modern life and try to break it down as best as I can using political science, psychology, sociology, media analysis, philosophy.
And dialectic analysis to the best of my ability or to the best of anyone's ability to read or understand Hagle, nothing off limits, gods masters, or things that give us clout. I want you to see me as the anti salesman, someone who not only does it, I want to sell you something actively, wants to make it harder for other entities to sell you things or ideas.
Ideally in every interaction in life, we would use something like standard form, a philosophical strategy in which rhetoric or prose is broken down premise by premise so that you can easily analyze what someone is trying to sell you when speaking. But that's never how things are delivered to us in life.
The things being sold to us are often cloaked in symbolism. Modern life is so complex that it can sometimes feel like we don't have agency of ourselves anymore. Like we're at the whim of the universe and all its chaotic motion. Like you're a piece of driftwood in an ocean. My goal here is to give you the philosophical and psychological tools to better understand life itself so that you don't have to feel like your life is in the hands of things outside of your control, a compass and a motorboat.
Amongst the ideological tides of life. Now this is an excellent place to segue into what I'd like to talk about today. And that is credibility. Not only that, but the utilitarian purpose of credibility for use in persuasion or the human enterprise of changing minds to do so. I want to give you a couple of glimpses into the invisible Wars being waged for your attention every moment of every day and the weapons that are being used against you and how you can learn them.
And use them to your own advantage. And I promise never to get this into the weeds in an intro ever again. Welcome to the show.
is it, the humans tend to be so drawn to rhetoric or storytelling. I use the term rhetoric here to mean anything that can change a mind, a story, a photo, a movie, a song, a pep talk, or a particularly zesty after dinner mint. It really doesn't matter. Anything you experience while thinking one way and then leave thinking another way.
I would say that rhetoric can have an almost hypnotic nature due to the fact that it is our vessel through which we prove to the world that we exist. In our heads where these wonderfully complex mixtures of abstract thoughts and emotions, and to convey these ideas and feelings, we have to squeeze them into signs or words, rhetorical devices that can contain as much of our original ideas as possible.
I think this is the game that draws us in when someone is a good speaker, it means they have some ability to convey high level ideas through the combination of their symbolic choice of language. But what they're really good at is reducing concepts to the confines of that language. I also say it as their choice of language here, instead of their choice of words, to also include nonverbal communication or what we'd call charisma in an individual that speaks well, most of communication is nonverbal and half our context gets expressed just in how we carry ourselves.
We don't really have a word for something like an advertisement that communicates well. We just call it a good advertisement. And that's part of the issue. We'll get into that a little later on this episode, I'm going to explore a lens that I've used in my life to examine what makes for good rhetoric, a filter that you can apply, not only to your own thought processes in order to be more charismatic or persuasive when outwardly expressing, but also a filter that you can use to analyze incoming information, essentially being able to better identify what is scientifically called bullshit.
And you know what I mean? When I say bullshit, even if you may not be able to name it, bad, rhetoric exists very obviously in the speeches of politicians that say provably false things or characters in TV shows written just to give backstory on other characters only to never be seen. Again, this can be more than just bad conveyance through words.
This is a failure to understand what gives speech and a theorial credible nature. But this failure to understand rhetoric can also occur in things like ad campaigns that do more harm than good or behaviors or commodities that seem to repulse you without reason, this is a failure to reduce art, to language and language to the symbolic.
I'm going to take this common failure to reduce as a means to both explain today's concept and myself at the same time in order to do so. I'm going to explain the rhetorical tricks I'm pulling right before I pull them. A producer of a show will try their best to coach their talent into being quote unquote likable.
So how does that work? When I am my own producer? The difference. Here is no producer worth their weight in product placement would ever have their talent say this out loud on the show, but I want my show to feel very meta or self referential. So whenever I can, I'm going to be completely transparent when it comes to these psychological tricks of the trade, because my goal here.
Isn't to make money, but to inform and explore. I also think that by explaining what makes for persuasive or good rhetoric, you, the listener can better cultivate power and influence over the world around you while simultaneously loosening the grip of the ideologies in your life. This brings me back to the philosophical lens, through which to view consumable media.
That lens is called the rhetorical triangle, but is most commonly referred to by its parts, ethos, pathos, and logos. It's taught most commonly in creative or persuasive writing courses, but I think it's better applied storytelling as a whole. I also think the term storytelling can be applied to damn near anything.
So you can see where this would be a powerfully informative concept. In a future episode, I might cover humanity's affinity for, or biological susceptibility to storytelling or how all aspects of life can ultimately be reduced into symbols. But for now let's suffice to say all art tells stories verbally or non-verbally and people are naturally drawn to stories.
Therefore anything you or someone else creates can be pass through the rhetorical triangle, including this very podcast you are listening to now, which I will analyze for you. You're welcome. I'll put a link to further reading on the rhetorical triangle in the show notes, but to briefly summarize the three points of the triangle, create three pillars that hold up a given narrative.
The Aristotle theorized made the rhetoric within said narratives, more compelling. The three corners of the triangle symbolizing different aspects of story must take on to make it past people's bullshit detectors. When you are born, you start off as a clean slate while a very small portion of your personality or predisposition may be genetic or environments.
And our interactions make us who we are. Everyone you meet in life is an amalgamation of all the experiences that have brought them to you in that moment. This is why it is important to study how we can to adopt different ideas, because people have a tendency to encounter an idea, forget it, and then integrate it into their personalities without thinking about it.
When people are met with new ideas or concepts, they go through a sort of deep cryption process where the concept's attached to the language they're presented with. Get weighed against the authority, humanity, and logic, the person or thing, presenting those ideas, ethos. Pathos and logos. These are the basic concepts behind the rhetorical triangle.
For example, you see an advertisement for a store that sells hats. Let's call it straw man's haberdashery. The byline of the ad in front of the store says that the store has been operating for over a hundred years. This is to establish in your mind that they have the authority to speak on what makes a good hat as ordained by over a hundred years of customers on the cover, an image of a beautiful model wearing the hat.
And not much else is used. This is the stirrup primal desire within you without explicitly saying. So if you wear our hats, you'll be more attractive to the opposite sex is what it means to say. But it doesn't, it's not saying that the model on the cover will desire you. They're selling you the idea that you can become the model on the cover.
They're selling you the means to be desired, but they explicitly say none of this finally at the bottom of the ad, Since you're a socially conscious modern consumer, you read the body of the ad to see how their hats are made in great detail. They go on to talk about the process through which they ethically sourced the material for and assemble their hats and walking you through their own justification for existence.
It silences that part of your mind that says, Oh, just. Buy a hat where at one, so to collect dust in my closet for years before I finally throw it away, I don't need to buy a hat. Those fears can now be dismissed more easily because according to the ad, they're environmentally conscious and ethically source the materials.
So I do my ethical duty to the environment by allowing myself to be a consumer. This one time, this concept is rendered perfectly by Slovenian philosopher, Slavs yak, who explains this concept in a great YouTube clip. I will place in the show notes. My straw man's haberdashery example is a little abstract, but it should help illustrate the legs of persuasive rhetoric and semiotics or the study of symbolism.
Now, as a brief disclaimer, before we get into the first pillar, I've not found much data on the tangible statistics of the manipulative nature of this method specifically. But it's hard to imagine how learning to be more persuasive. Couldn't be used to increase power for better or worse. I want to briefly consider the ethics for analyzing the power to change Pines.
For instance, someone who learns how to be more persuasive using the rhetorical triangle and then reworks an advertisement in a dishonest way in order to gain more customers. We can agree that this would be wrong. That would also suggest a situation in which an advertiser unaware of the triangle could ethically rework a faulty yet.
So is it better for me not to teach you these concepts? So as to save you from potentially using them unethically, I don't know. I honestly don't. I know the answer to this question. I'm not an ethicist, I'm just a journalist. Barely. I'm more of a podcast. So for this discussion, and let's simply assume that the triangle is just a helpful tool.
We're creating good art and not to be used maliciously. It's a very fine line. Some would say no line at all. Between successful advertising and propaganda. The main difference seems to be intention. So always remember to be empathetic. In short, what I will outline here should be used for persuasion and not manipulation.
I'll get into this a little more in the logo section, but briefly your intention always be to improve yourself or others, not to impose your own will on others. So with that said, here, I am telling you that I'm going to make you trust me in hopes that over the next 60 minutes or so, I can Lowell your subconscious into a state of certainty, even though you'll consciously be trying to prove otherwise people hate to have their ideas challenged.
So I'll explain how I Carmen, Electra around the defenses before this is an editor's note. Uh, I meant to say Catherine Zeta Jones. I do not know why I said Carmen Electra. So summary of concept, then example of concept through my own life. Then after we've explored all three parts of the triangle in this way, I'll explain how they each fit into the concept of the show as a whole.
And by that point, hopefully. You see me as a friend, which on a meta narrative level, I sincerely hope that you do eventually remember the NTI salesmen. Now, before we begin to illustrate the power of language, I'd like to simply say, Mere cat, a cute tiny wide eyed baby mere cat. And you see one now it's eyes are shiny.
It's head tilted. As it nervously looks you over, maybe it reaches for your hand. It's first soft and it's eyes narrow. As you can imagine, petting its tiny head. Did you know that mere cats are highly social animals and often take turns babysitting each other's young. I just thought I'd mentioned that.
Don't think too hard about it now. Where were we?
the concept or, Hey buddy, who do I think you are?
Ethos means character. It's probably more clear to view it as authority or things that make a person credible to speak on a given topic. When taught in the context of a writing class, it's said that when writing, you should ask yourself, what are my qualifications to speak on this subject? This is the same question you should ask yourself while reading.
And if I can put my own Neo Aristotelian spin on it, since everything can be boiled down to some form of ideological narrative or language being conveyed through containers, like words or images. And you can apply this line of thought to every physically and mentally consumable thing. Some things are easy to decipher.
The ethos of politicians who make plans for society are said to have a mandate, to govern through the majority democratic vote ads that pop up online, show customer quotes, or five star reviews. However, not everything is so straightforward. The ideological authority behind say a stop sign is a little more psychological or abstract.
The authority of a stop sign is reinforced by the weight of the organization forces traffic laws, but you don't consciously think of the DMV as your vehicle slows to a stop. Even though the stop sign is not a traditional form of narrative, as in it includes words, but isn't a book, its ethos still functions the same, a stop sign.
Doesn't need to appeal to your emotions or explain why you need to stop. It's ethos is strong enough to compel or in this case, we can say persuade you to comply. This concept can be applied to people. When approached by a stranger, either in real life or digitally, they're almost always trying to elicit something from you, be it attention or money or affection or whatever, even when people act in movies or videos or produce podcasts, like the one I'm currently doing.
They're engaging in a form of active ethos, refreshment. They need to remind you of their credentials, not only explicitly, but also implicitly in their appearance to keep your subconscious occupied reassured like the stop sign you obey without thinking to stick with podcasting. As an example, let's quickly examine Joe Rogan.
He himself doesn't have the traditional credentials of someone who does interviews. And yet he seems to be one of the best. Personally, I think this anti ethos is exactly Joe Rogan's appeal by leaning into his non expertise. He gains credibility from his guests by putting himself in the listener's shoes and acting as a passive pipeline to their thoughts.
He does this for a listener who almost certainly also lacks the ethos to properly absorb the information that is given. But it's entertained because of Joe Rogan do it. So can I, so how can one cultivate authority education is probably the most common means. This is what makes degrees so highly sought after in our society.
It's not enough to simply we have knowledge of one particular field. The degree functions like a voucher for your knowledge dispute that you do not actually have the knowledge you claim to one would have to also dispute the organization that vouched for you through the degree, easy, perhaps in terms of a community college, less.
So in cases of Ivy league schools, even though the information being taught may be exactly the same. That's what makes Ivy league schools so sought after the value of one's knowledge lay somewhat on the susceptibility of that knowledge to reproach? You can then ask the question. Okay. So the degree borrows credibility, how does the university Gates credibility in the first place to expand on this idea?
Let's look at a theory that philosopher John Locke considered the father of modern liberalism or freedom of the individual used to explain the relation of populations to their governments. And then we'll see if we can extract a frame that we can apply to organizations or individually John Locke's social contract theory, posits that there is an spoken contract between entities like governments and their people.
One facet of this contract is the mere fact that the people do not rise up against the government every day. So therefore they implicitly lend authority to the government. There is no explicit contract signing that says someone else can tell them what to do, but they seem okay with it when the government does it.
So it must be agreed upon on some level. This is what John Locke calls passive consent in a way. This exists in the rhetoric of universities and companies. When they say how long they've existed. They've not yet been felled by the cruelty of time or marketplace and are therefore more likely to have perhaps seemingly divine edict to exist.
They haven't been destroyed yet. So they must be doing something right in the case of CEOs or let's say presidential candidates. This can also come in the form of who they've managed to beat out. In order to secure their own position. Every day, they remain unconsidered against adds to the appearance of their legitimacy.
Another type of passive consent is the acceptance of benefits, but I would extend this to even the perceived receival of benefits. One can easily imagine this in a government, in the form of welfare safety or infrastructure, but in an individual, this could perhaps take the form of advice giving or perceived value.
If someone claims to have the secret to getting rich quick, and you believe them. This perceived benefit will make you that much more likely to accept the things that they have to say as credible, especially if the quote unquote proof of their wealth is on display. This is why these types of YouTube charlatans tend to rent cars and models and mansions to include in the advertisements for their drivel and our capitalist system money tends to equal social influence.
Social influence is power and power is a means to cultivate authority. In a future episode, I'll explore why this particular factor makes billionaires so dangerous. In the example of the university, probably more so than passive consent. The perceived value of the collective knowledge of the university gives them credibility.
I would call this ethos by way of logos or something like ethos, ipso, facto. They have credibility based on what they can do in the individual. This would be a person who is able to perform very advanced calculations. They learn from the internet without having to attend MIT and the cultural realm. We can see this in, let's say, radio broadcasting, what gives a radio station, the right to decide what is, and isn't good music.
The fact alone that they control the stations that broadcast. The music is brought to them and the music sounds good. Therefore, they must be the authority on what is and isn't music. How can you possibly dispute that? Now there's a, our argument to John Locke's theories on governmental authority that says for a contract to be valid, there must be a means for either entity to opt out in governance.
This is a little complex, but for our application, as an example of individual credibility, the opting out of a social contract with someone you deem as credible would be as easy as simply ceasing to believe in their authority on a given subject. Contract void. The other most obvious way to build credibility is maturity mandate.
That's how it works. In most parts of our society. Just put it to a vote in our post enlightenment individualist, liberal society. We believe that every individual is divine in some sense, and can make decisions for their own destiny. This can create a paradox and communal society where one person's freedom may inhibit the expression of another person's freedom.
The way we resolve this paradox is by majority mandate. If one person equals one vote, then the will of the majority has a divine or transcendent mandate. This is in contrast to monarchal societies that believe the divine mandate literally ran through the blood of the royalty and therefore the ruler of a nation had the obligation to make decisions for the people.
We justify majority mandate in the same way, the cable car ethics example works cable cars, heading down a track with five people tied to the rails. You can pull a lever which will change the direction of the cable car, but there is one person tied to the alternate track. Basically few sacrifice, one person to save five.
Our society says yes, derail the car because one, since all individuals have the same worth, it's better to save more lives rather than less lives. And too, we have thousands of years active experimentation and societal building. In other words, we have no problem pulling the lever as opposed to throwing up our hands and just saying it's God's will.
Now I should mention though, that there are some situations in our modern life that mess with our perspective on this matter. For example, what if the single person on the alternate track was a billionaire and owner of the cable car company? Or in a more realistic example, an autonomous car is driving its passenger down a busy street.
When it's suddenly cut off by a semi truck, the car runs the calculations and realizes it doesn't have enough time to avoid the truck. The car can swerve and avoid the truck, but doing so would kill people walking on the sidewalk. The car can also continue on its current course killing only one person, but that person is its owner.
At some point, our society will need to reckon with this predicament. Does capital ownership elevate the worth of an individual. Perhaps this is a discussion for another day. These concepts philosophically highlight the reasoning behind why we lend credibility to things outside of work. But what about psychology?
Why humans seem to have a predisposition to organizing themselves into hierarchies of authority. Psychobiologically after we're born. God like authoritarian figures take care of us, that we call parents. As we grow, we're conditioned to look for these same benevolent transcendent forces to make decisions for us to further elucidate this concept.
We can look at an experiment done by psychologist Stanley Milgrim in the 1960s. His study was meant to explore the reasons behind human obedience or trust in authority for our purposes. In the experiment 40 men were told they were going to be taking part in a study on the effects of punishment on learning.
Each of the 40 men were going to be helping a volunteer, learn a pair of words, but we're told that each time the learner made a mistake, they were to be shocked with an electrical current activated by the teachers. In reality, the learners were actually in on the experiment and we're not actually shocked, but instead we're told to tend to be in great pain.
When the fake shocks were administered by the 40 volts, it was found that a shocking two thirds of the teachers gave what they thought to be. Excrutiatingly painful shocks to the learner when it was assumed that their empathy would override the directive by the authority of the scientists who hired them to shock these innocent people.
Meaning that only a third of the main refused to follow orders out of empathy. The following are just a couple of the varying factors that increase the likelihood of obedience in the 40 men. If commands were given by an authority figure instead of another volunteer. This borrowed the credibility of the institution that hired the scientists to run the experiment and added to the weight of their directive.
More easily surpassing the hesitations of empathy in the volunteers. This was doubly. So if the experiments were performed on a prestigious university campus, as opposed to offsite in a parking lot, somewhere, another factor was if the learner receiving the shock was in another room. By placing the subject far away, the scientists actively suppressed any empathy or pathos the teachers had for the learners, which allowed the ethos or authority to persuade the volunteers more effectively to follow orders.
The directives rhetorical pathos was unable to be crafted in a way that increased the effectiveness of the directive. It actually had the opposite effect. So in, in this case, the subject. Had to be removed as a factor. So it's not to poison the ethos of the directive, more on the power of pathos in the next section.
Everybody wants to justify their own actions to what they see as the unspoken laws of the universe, or what is commonly called fate? What French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan called the big other or the secret order of things that gives our lives agency and meaning by serving as the societal super ego that forces us to keep up the appearance of order.
And to forsake our primal hedonistic desires for, for some, this can be God, but it can also be thought of as a more secular force, like an authoritarian state, or even more abstract like destiny, or just the way of the world. You are much less in control of yourself than you probably think that you are.
You're able to control the next thoughts that appear in your mind. About as much as you are able to control the next thoughts that appear in my mind, you can force it sometimes by focusing on a task or trying to imagine something specific. But notice how your mind always eventually wanders in directions that you didn't tell it to.
This is where psychoanalysts think our desires really come from. We sometimes choose to consciously pursue them, but they originate from something beneath the ego or what we think of when we think of the term, I. Humans are at the mercy of desires, that bubble up from our subconsciouses and we are thus vulnerable to suggestion from external forces that also implies that we are not fully in control of our destiny.
Since our dreams can be so heavily infected inspire environment, we seek grounding me inspiration, and most importantly justification for our internal desires in agencies from the external world. We need them to tell us that we're free to do what we want, like in your yearning to be part of a collective, you may become an avid support fan or a rabid consumer of partisan politics, but what you really need, it was just an agency to tell you that it's okay to choose and then fight outsiders.
In this way, we leave an opening for authority figures, or those with ethos to both seed and then justify the slaking of our desires through ordained action. We need an external order to make our own wanting valid. The big other is concept devised for these imagined agencies. But there is an argument to be made that these agencies don't actually exist in any tangible or physical form, except for in our minds.
We imagine that the big other exists and justify what we cannot justify on our own. This is why humans go searching for meaning through expression. Why we seek some form of authority. It is to justify or validate ourselves on some level, even the person who rejects society in all greater agency and walks into the desert does so through a recognition and then rejection of the perceived societal big other, they live their life almost in a protest that could not exist without the agency.
They're rebelling against even a child. Born to wolves has to believe in the agency that necessitates the pack. Or the circle of life,
this predisposition to believe in a greater order makes it that much easier for an external force, like a corporation to step in and convince you that they alone hold the means to your liberation. Like the con man who tells you how to get rich quick, both implies the holiness of wealth. Through the appearance of their lifestyle, but also the justification of your personal dreams and desires by using wealth as a vehicle or ideological frame on which you place those desires, he claims to sell you wealth or the means to wealth, but his true deviousness lies in selling your own dreams back to you through the guise of assumed capitalist credibility, without a belief in the ethos and agency of money, the con man's credibility falls flat.
Now as you can see, ethos and authority in general are a pretty big topic. Probably deserving of their own episode, but for our purposes of persuasive rhetoric here, I think this is more than good enough. This show that you're listening to right now will probably not rely heavily on guests and borrowed credibility.
I may do some interviews later if a relevant professional enters my sphere. But for the most part, all instead, try to include sources and lean on logic to engage on topics. I'm not a traditional authority on ethos by way of logos. I want to portray myself as an honest, curious thinker. I went you the listener to be able to, by your own desires, through your own agency or at the very least.
Be able to identify when it desire has been given to you by an external force now to give you a better view of my personal ethos or what I am more traditionally credible well to speak on. I want to tell you a little bit about my professional and educational background in order to catch you up on my life story.
So far ethos or how to stretch a communications degree to the absolute limit
right now, as I record this, I am physically a pretty average 25 year old, not too soft around the edges, but I do have an affinity for beer that I picked up in college. So I assume it's only a matter of time before my edges go soft. Usually I'm in a pretty good place as a teen and young adult, I struggled with depression, but never sought out help for fear of weakness to myself.
This caused me to explore for meaning wherever I could find it. These days with a basic understanding of brain chemistry and a super basic understanding of psychology. I tend to be a fairly level headed up. I would also not recommend finding meaning yourself. The stigma against therapy makes absolutely no sense to me.
I'm broadcasting out of Sao Paulo, Brazil, where I'm living with my girlfriend of three years and slowly learning Portuguese. My current job title is the director of production for a podcast company called jam street media. That I started with one of my former college professors. But before, before I get to the point too quickly, I'm going to pull a Tarantino and move the story all the way back to 2012, I was about 16 or 17 living in Turlock, which is a farm town of about 73,000 people in the Northern central Valley of calorie.
An area you could be forgiven for not knowing intimately. Most notably, my hometown has one of the few non-Spanish derived names in Northern, in California, Turlock being derived from the Gaelic word Turlough, which means low lying wet limestone. It was called Turlock after a wealthy grain farmer declined the honor, which I have here in quotations of having the town named after him.
It is pure poetry. This town that thinks so highly of itself is literally named after a wet rock. Turlock is located in a County that voted overwhelmingly for Trump, been 2016 and is the birthplace of former NFL star turned activist, Collin Rand Kaepernick. These two facts, I include sequentially for no particular reason.
And Turlock was once featured in Ripley's believe it or not as having the most churches per capita in all of the United States. Speaking of churches. I was raised Protestant Christian, more on that in the, my logos section. But the part of my childhood you need to know right now is that I always had a knack for video.
I grew up watching my father, film everything on a camcorder and after watching jackass for the first time around 2005, Started editing videos with my friends on my mom's office, computer in windows, movie maker. By the end of my senior year of high school, I was creating my school's psh. At 17. I moved to the closest big city I could think of to continue honing my love of film.
I chose to go to the Academy of art university in San Francisco, where I lived in the dorms for a year and then a 300 square foot apartment after that, where I often walked around the city aimlessly since I didn't have many friends or I read at night while I allegedly. Sold weed for spare cash. It was in that studio apartment that I honed it.
A lot of my technical skills being too young to drink and too late by a fake ID. Despite my level, I managed to remain a complete dumb ass until shortly we, before creating this very show. I like in the Academy of art to a trade school for artists, albeit dozens of times more expensive. It was a privilege that I even got to go.
And that school really is a gamble. Since I was already familiar with video editing, I was able to skip it. One of my intro classes and they had an upper level podcasting class. Since audio editing seemed to only be one half of video editing. And since I had some prior audio experience from a short lipped rap career, Hey, I was 17.
I managed to pick up audio editing pretty fast by the end of my first semester, my professor Bay area radio veteran, Maddie stout pulled me aside and said that when I graduated, he would make sure there was a job waiting for me. Yeah, sure. Okay, dude. I'm going to be the next Spielberg said every one Oh one level film student ever in my time at the Academy, I was lucky enough to be completely unaware of where my life was taking me, but that reason I chose a communications track and started taking every strange class I could.
I took drone. I would in classes, sociology classes, philosophy, psychology, photography, motion, graphics, acting, sound, design, music theory, creative writing transmedia theory, broadcasting advertising, semiotics, journalism, interviewing. And editing for podcasting to name a few over four years, I did a tour of duty in the humanities.
Before I graduated. I had a show on the college radio station called nerd incorporated. While at the same time serving as that station's program director, the year I graduated in early 2016, our station was once described by the SF Chronicle as gray that's. G R E Y. It was great for getting into concerts for free around the city though, before I graduated, I had an internship and later a full time job at the podcast syndication company, Stitcher, where I learned more about the commerce of storytelling through podcasts and curation and marketing.
Then later the ins and outs of customer support and RSS management as the sole customer support rep, then later how to get completely owned at foosball. Each day I would come into work with hundreds of helped me emails in my inbox. This is where I learned the patients that only those who interface directly with customers have, right before I left that job, I wrote a binder title, the content manifesto outlining numerous ways in which the platform could improve.
Not the least of which was adding video functionality, a feature to my current knowledge. They don't offer still, but Spotify is now transitioning into, in the wake of their multimillion dollar acquisition of the Joe Rogan podcast. Not that I'm bitter or anything. At one point, I also worked for a freelance motion graphics company, which we'll hear go unnamed.
My goals were always unclear and I developed a really bad smoking habit, but I did learn a lot about the pitfalls of freelancing and a few after effects tricks. So it wasn't a complete wash. I also started an entertainment podcast called scene and nerd. That's still available where I talk shit about movies with two guys named Pete Benevidez and Matt salesy.
We had a pretty decent following when I left. Some of the most insane bits I've ever written in my life were performed on that show. It was easier to be cringe online the way with it in 2014 at one point. Yeah. I was also working construction with my dad back in my hometown on one occasion. He had me sweep dirt out of about a miles worth of gutter.
In 105 degree heat, plus nobody likes the boss's son. And since I had seen Zoolander one too many times, I tried to get a different gig as fast as I could. Sure. Enough, in 2016, when I graduated it did Maddie did have a job waiting for me. He and I knew quite a bit about branded podcasting at that time, next evolution of the medium.
So we created the first instance of jam street media called Maddie media, a two man branded podcast production company that worked with clients like Cisco systems and the federal reserve bank of San Francisco. It also allowed me to start working remotely and funding my budding drinking habit at the ripe old age of 22.
This went on for about six months until Maddie managed to get me a job as the production assistant at iHeart radio, San Francisco. Within three months of starting that position, my manager transferred to LA and I had my first managerial position. I spent three years at that company. And in that time I created hundreds of videos with artists like Charlie Puth, ice cube, Ty Dolla sign, Sean Mendez, and the late Nipsey hussle to name a few post Malone also once offered me a swig of penny.
And hit from his blunt. I learned the way the music industry and radio industry worked and the act of ideological warfare waged on adolescent minds across the United States every day. Now, before this all turns into a reading of my LinkedIn profile, I'll wrap it up with this in late 2019, I saw the writing on the walls part was dropping producers left and right.
And I had saved up enough to bail. So I did, I got reconnected with my ex girlfriend, did a bunch of hallucinogens and decided I was going to travel the world to find myself. I moved out of San Francisco for the first time in nearly a decade. And after going back to Turlock for just long enough to reacquaint with my parents and the family dogs, I moved to the United Kingdom with my former ex.
Now current girlfriend, Julia. That's not quite where the story ends though. This was exactly the same moment that COVID-19 wrapped around the globe in a moment of wishful thinking, Julia and I decided to spend two weeks in Brazil to visit her family during these hard times. That was about five months ago.
You'll remember at the start of this section, I said I was currently broadcasting from Sao Paulo. In this time I've been able to work remotely for jam street media while having nearly the entire day to explore more spiritual concepts and read a lot of the books I'd been putting off for years, but I was also left with hands idle and many devils in my head.
Hints, this huge endeavor. We now trod through together. Dear listener in short, I may talk about some subjects here in which I may not be traditionally credible, but I will try to make a distinctive line between that, which I can know for certain that, which I can cite and that which I can assume through honest curiosity or induction or deduction.
The definition of this honest curiosity depends on the trustworthiness of me as a person. And that brings us. To pay those, paid those, the concept or what we hate to care about
plea pathos is heart. Although it literally translates to pity or that which causes sadness. It's the elemental dichotomy of Kirk to Spock what we commonly referred to as gut feelings and currently the ruling doctrine of the United States of America. They are the feelings that facts don't care about and more and more tend to be overlooked in modern discourse.
In a writing course, it's taught as the human element, a sort of a theorial substance to a story that can't be quantified. Like, can you use numbers to describe a sunset? I mean, you could maybe quantify the luminosity and the frequency of the colors or the astronomical or physics principles behind light refraction in the atmosphere.
But you can't use that information to predict exactly how a human brain will react to it. You can give the exact same sensory data to two different people and get radically different outcomes. Humans are complex webs of intricate signs and symbols. And every moment we live, those symbols get more and more complex as they take on new associations and arms.
Emotional intelligence is more important now than ever. That's in no small part due to the weapon of emotions and the media and advertising industries today. And the reactionary nullification of emotion in online debate sensationalism sells. And it sells because even though we like to believe that we're all autonomous, our actions and our emotions are driven by something out of range of conscious observation.
It's part of our subconscious something between what Freud called the ed and Lacan called the subject. It's the part of ourselves that disappears like a Mirage. When we try to observe it, the true version of ourselves that we imagine our conscious mind or ego is trying to emulate. It's the part of you that your therapist tries to coax out when they ask you to speak at length about anything?
Hoping that you'll say in elucidating, Freudian slip, when you're not trying to be you consciously. It is that unknowable you, that your mother referred to when you were still a newborn and trying to understand the concept of I or whose hands these are same unknowable internal place where our desires bubble up from much like with ethos, this internal drive to seek understanding of our needs.
Can be hijacked by external forces, more so than general emotion. Pathos may be better represented by empathy. At some point, during your childhood development, hopefully your super marginal gyrus became fully developed inside of your brain. And you realize that the people around you have lives just as vivid as your own.
You begin cringing at the sight of others in pain. And if you didn't, you likely became a libertarian. In which case, no amount of lecturing can help you. We all share the same neural architecture more or less. So our emotion should more or less feel the same. Albeit with varying levels of intensity, depending on your environmental.
You've probably heard it said that humans are social creatures. This can be expanded to another cliche. No, man is an Island. Look at our societies as a whole. We more than survived due to intersectionality. We thrive because of it. The agricultural revolution freed up, well, maybe forced is a better term human populations to find other ways than providing food, to serve our communities.
This has made doubly important for better or worse in an industrial society where this simple Wallick, communal value is reduced to pure monetary terms. Humans care about what each other are doing and thinking and feeling because we have a vested interest in each other. Your wellbeing is more conducive.
To my wellbeing at the very least practicing empathy is an evolutionarily useful tool for understanding the reasoning behind one another's actions. Since the human mind in its logical reasoning is so hard to measure with logic. Sometimes it's occasionally easier to understand each other through the frame of emotion and empathy.
Humans have two distinct abilities that allowed us to conquer the globe because no other animal is either capable of them. Or capable of them on the same level. One of which is our massive capacity for language, like a hammer against iron, the best ideas our species ever came up with where the biproduct of communication and the ability of one human to fit ideas into signs or words and relay them to another person or even another generation.
Now other animals have language, but in humans, this is coupled with a distinctly human characteristic. If we think of signifiers and concepts, as signifies as Lacan called symbols and the symbolic respectively, we see that multiple concepts can be applied to single signifiers or multiple ideas can be embedded in single words.
This ability for humans to use context, to derive multiple signifies from a single signifier is what Lacan called our ability to cross the bar. As in crossing the bar to the metaphor realm, for instance, for a phrase like raining cats and dogs, to make sense, we not only need to know the literal concept for rain, cats, and dogs, but we also need to understand that in this specific context, The contrast in size from rain droplets to small mammals is being symbolically implied or summoned.
This crossing from the literal realm to the symbolic realm is where we get our ability for abstract thought. It is from abstract thought that we get our ability to empathize. Or to put it in computer terms to empathize is to simply reverse engineer the output or emotional state of another person from running a presumed emotional reaction to stimuli on our own software or mind.
In this case, we see an angry person. We try to imagine what made them angry. And if we arrive at the same conclusion with on our own personal context, We're compelled to practice sympathy. Although this last part is not guaranteed. I think this unique ability in humans to imagine and feel things apart from ourselves, draws us into the rhetorical modern people like to think that they're more civilized than their animalistic desires and try their best to separate raw feelings from their daily life.
A film or a song makes you sad while you're on the bus. And you try to hide your tears out of a fear of being embarrassed or misunderstood. You lose your temper at a loved one and are quickly overcome with a wash of shame. We like to think that when we take in information, we're being completely objective.
And if something is said, that is a logical, our brains automatically disregard this information for us. This also subconsciously implies that all of our emotional output. Is justified and based on purely logical instances, this is a fallacy. Our minds are still governed by the same ancient architecture that governed our ancestors.
We have an ancient reptilian brain that governs our motor functions and animalistic desires built underneath a hyper rationalized pattern seeking supercomputer of a mammalian brain. That adds an infinite layer of complexity to the analysis of human behavior. Our input output is not one for one. Each bit of stimuli we take in is filtered and refracted through a lifetime of lived experience and genetic predisposition.
Although most scientists agree the former counts for far more than the latter. This idea that human minds are all built on. Similar ancient architecture is called structuralism. And is a theory popularized by psychoanalysis, Carl EWM and his idea of the archetypes. Just like how did not need to be told to fly South for winter.
Alright. Is it North for winter? I don't actually know whichever way birds fly for winter and inhuman. This is theorized as built in spaces in our minds that are filled by certain stories that fit into those voids, like puzzle pieces that were predisposed to certain characters within certain stories.
Why else would humans seem to be so predisposed to believe in religion or spirituality, even an atheist fills this creation myth sized hole in their minds with reason or ethics or some kind of historical narrative to explain the way of the world, even the non-religious needs, some kind of agency outside of ourselves.
American professor Joseph Campbell. Further illuminated this idea in his book, the hero with a thousand and faces in which he examines the city clarity of myths across cultures. You're probably familiar with the hero's journey also, which is Campbell summarization of the themes that occur across myths, regardless of originating culture, structuralism and archetypes imply the importance of the study of human expression as a portal, through which to better understand human nature and history.
And what is the driving force behind human creativity and artistic expression. If not emotion, therefore by studying emotion and practicing pathos, we may be able to better understand the human nature or history. Very quickly, a bit more on the factual validity of emotions. From a purely materialist perspective, our emotions are governed heavily by the chemical balances within our brain.
You skip a meal, your glucose drops and you get angry. Our emotions are not some transcendent, a theorial thing that we can't understand. Although the complexities may bubble up from somewhere in our subconscious, we can link our emotional States pretty reliably to the physical realm. When someone says facts don't care about your feelings, it's like, okay, sure.
That feeling sure seemed to affect the facts of life and the facts of life. Sure. Seem to affect our feelings. Like a perfectly logical speech delivered in monotone falls on deaf ears while an impassioned yet illogical one is often met with applause. How can you ignore the impact of emotion on human action and human action on the physical world?
Those who work within the rhetorical. Ignore pathos at their own risk. The philosopher, David Hume also had much to say about the validity of emotions in reason he posited that reason is the slave of passion. Reason is the afterthought to confirm our passions and feelings that were first driven to act by the unknowable depths of ourselves.
We then use reason to make sense of our passions and desires. Not the other way around. I once heard it said that human behavior is the refraction of chemicals through the prism of our brains and bodies. Like light through a glass prison. This refraction expresses itself as emotions and it almost all happens.
Subconsciously for instance, when you see a small dog, unless you are part of the considerable population with psychosis, your conscious thoughts are probably okay. Something along the lines of, Oh, what a cute puppy behind the scenes in your mind. The images you're taking in are being filtered through and compared to a lifetime of information, you're recalling every interaction with small mammals you've ever had.
You're seeing the size of the creature's eyes and comparing it to other infants. So you've interacted with the chemicals in your brain, brain associated with love and protection of loved ones are being spiked. And not only that, but every interaction your ancestors had with small differences, things also enters into the equation in the form of a possible genetic predisposition to love small defenseless things.
Billions of people, these calculations happen in an instant. But it's only consciously registered as the fuzzy emotions you feel. When you say something is cute, your eyes and ears take in these cute images or sounds signifiers and connects them to a web of concepts in your mind. Signifies these interconnections are determined by lived experience and genetic predisposition, but we experienced them as indescribable euphoria.
We as a society then created words like happy or sad in order to quantify and share these euphoric States with others. But the complexities of these euphoric emotional States can never be wholly captured by words alone, this indiscretion well, part of the symbolic or imaginary that Lacan called the real is oftentimes the part that is hijacked when you're emotionally vulnerable.
In this way, the pathos of a narrative can be ideologically the most powerful due to its ability to summon unconscious signifies. Within our minds, Freud said it was the repressed unconscious desires that are the strongest within us. One way to show this biologically, for example, is the phenomenon of priming in what you're saying.
Subconscious can be fed with stimuli, which readies specific sets of neurons containing signifies imagined in the stimuli. Or in other words, you can be secretly fed symbols or words that you don't consciously register, but that stick in the back of your mind and can unconsciously affect your decisions.
This means when neurons in the same vicinity as the previously primed ones are activated, there's a much higher chance of your conscious mind, interconnecting, the primed signified to a newly introduced and scarcely connected signifier, or in other words, Repeating the primed words or ideas later can cause a much more powerful experience with them.
Even if you weren't consciously aware that you were fed the ideas earlier. For example, I want you the listener right now to think of a baby animal.
Now you may have thought of a puppy since we just discussed them and they're a pretty popular animal, but maybe. Just maybe you thought of a mere cat, a pretty uncommon animal, but one that I primed you for earlier by creating a link between mere cats and typical, cute human behavior. I just now mentioned the signifier animal, which fired the area of your mind with neurons associated with any images or experiences of animals you've ever had.
Your conscious mind was drawn to these neurons most recently fired. In this case, mere cats or puppies and their association with cuteness, which we also recently discussed. Now, ask yourself, what are you being primed for on a regular basis? When you have a craving for a food or a certain emotional reaction to a movie or song or an unexplainable to buy a commodity to satisfy a desire with, then you are your emotions really you are own, or have they been planted there by external forces and internal predisposition?
Are you really your own? We'll lead these questions on genetic determinism for another day for now, just be mindful of how your emotions arise. You go through life. Collecting stimuli recorded as partially realized symbols in the mind when you encounter familiar situations or symbols, all previous interactions with those symbols can be summoned instantly.
Even if they're not consciously registered. This means we should be careful what we allow into our minds. You never know how it will express itself within the context of rhetoric. This means that by storytelling or more specifically reducing your life to symbols. You can force empathy on your audience.
People are naturally drawn to the siren song of the Epic as a storyteller by practicing empathy and understanding structuralism and semiotics. One can summon specific thoughts or emotions in an audience. The trick here is to be vulnerable practice empathy on yourself, to better understand what would move someone else.
As a consumer, you can better understand the subliminal functions happening underneath the literal words, within a story or advertisement and the impact those functions and ideologies can have on your actions. Even subconscious. The trick here is to be guarded, practice empathy, not sympathy on it.
External force to determine their end goals when being presented with external rhetoric. Now. It's time for a story.
My papers are empathizer. I barely know her
section is going to be a lot shorter than the others. I'm not a firm believer in telling someone why they should, like you. You can respect me for my credentials and still think I'm an asshole, no matter what I tell you to do. And I don't want to beat that guy. When I graduated college, my grandmother, who was one of those people who was very soft spoken, but often says the most profoundly moving things.
When they speak gave me a handwritten letter. At that time in my life, I was pretty confused. I had a string of relationships that really didn't work out and left me bitter and confused. My career wasn't going anywhere. And despite having graduated with a BA in multimedia communications, whatever that is, I didn't feel like I'd entered into the exclusive club of alumni that I'd been led to believe existed.
I had a job I didn't like, and not only that through the experience of having to reinvent myself in a new city, completely different from the one I grew up in, I didn't really remember who I was even supposed to be or what I would even enjoy doing. If I wasn't chained to a desk job. The letter to this day serves as a reminder to me of life's greater journey.
The goal of life is more than to just survive at a job you don't completely hate doing until you're too old to live the dreams you couldn't live out for lack of money when you were young and can't live out for lack of energy. Now, the journey we all take in modern life seems to be an initiation back into our childhood.
When we're young, we live in a state of pure bliss and adventure. We're able to tap into a more raw form of creativity because we haven't yet been told what we're expected to think before. We're taught concepts like profitability. We create for the sake of creation, untainted by reputation, praise, or money.
As we age, we seem to go through phase of conformity, but at some point we wrestle with this path. As we get older, life becomes more routine. We get a handle on things. We start to see that maybe we didn't need to conform quite as much as we did. And we tried desperately to regain what we had back when we were uninhibited to paraphrase King warrior magician lover, a book about ancient male archetypes, young men, especially nowadays seek out a long lost tradition of initiation.
Indigenous tribes would often kidnap and abandoned or put through difficult trial boys. When they had reached the age of adulthood, this was symbolically the death of their childhood. It meant that they were now providers for the tribe. I think the act of nurturing is often stereotyped into female gender roles in our society.
When the act of nurturing is in fact, an asexual human act, young men, and I'm sure young women as well today go searching for this symbolic initiation into the upper ranks of their tribes. But no such rituals exist anymore. We often continue consuming various things. Most of which that hurt us, waiting for something to come along and tell us that we're now worthy of the task of nurturing, or if you haven't, at least I did, this is what my grandmother's letter said.
Congratulations. Casey. We're so proud of you. What a joy. It has been watching you grow into this young man. I remember this little baby on a blanket, cooing and blowing bubbles. At the same time, you thought that was so much fun. And the little boy who had to make everyone feel at home, you would see someone sitting alone and go talk or show them something.
People were very important to you. Then came Legos, trampoline, video games, what fun. And for one minute, I could keep up with you. It has been so much fun watching you and being a part of your world. And now you're graduating with the whole world in front of you. As you start your adventures. I hope you always keep that thoughtful and caring little boy inside of you.
My thoughts and prayers are always with you
this time of my life. I wasn't happy because I didn't see a path forward. I didn't see a path forward because I had lost the path that led me to that moment and forgot that boy who used to look up at the stars or hide away in his room with science books. He didn't fully understand. And most importantly, a boy who had a love for other people.
I look back and see this as the initiation into my adulthood. I'd been working for some time, but for what to consume, I didn't lift up the people around me and I was bitter. I was selfish. I was a child in a man's body. This letter was the emotional equivalent of my tribe, beating the shit out of me. And that is the lesson.
I always try to keep with me. I try to remember that little boy who loved people and wanted them to feel at home. And the nurturing man who now carries him.
The concept or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Tanium.
We now arrive at the base of the rhetorical triangle, the foundation that all the others are based on, and that is logos, which in Greek means claim. Well, we can think of here as logic. What is logic besides the name of Ben Shapiro's real doll simply put it is the study of valid inferences whereby establishing a reasonable position called a premise, and then establishing a connection to another reasonable position.
You're able to arrive at a conclusion. We take these steps or inferences towards further positions using a process called reasoning. These inferences can be either inductive or deductive. Inductive reasoning is the process of observing a phenomenon, establishing generalizations about the occurrence of set phenomenon, and finally creating a paradigm or an assumption about the likelihood of the specific patterns within these phenomenon.
For example, every dog I've seen in my life, scratches its ears with its back feet. Therefore it must be very common for dogs to scratch. There is what their hind legs. This line of reasoning while easier to use than the alternative can sometimes be used to arrive at false conclusions. For example, a person pulls coins blindly from a bag.
The first coin is a penny. The second, a penny third, a penny. Therefore all the coins in the bag must be pennies. This may be likely, but until all the coins in the bag of polled can not be proven. The other type of reasoning is deductive reasoning made popular by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character.
His famous quote is when you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth. This is the basic function of deduction. The creation of working theory. Comparing the phenomenon to the general theory, then testing the theory with an outlier. For example, all steel students in the class playing guitar.
Sam is a student in the class. Therefore Sam plays the guitar, or I found a quarter in the coin bag. Therefore, not all of the coins in the bag are pennies. This process is a good truth finding method, but it's not quite refined enough to be utilitarian in modern life. You can use these reasoning methods to arrive at likely conclusions, but neither is proven or as close to provable, as reality will allow for both logical methods operate under the assumption that our premises and therefore observations are true.
So it's impossible to validate the entire claim without a method for validating the observations, the claims are built on. Like, what if there's a coin in the bag that is not a penny or what if there's a student in the class that does not play guitar? Absolute truth is incredibly hard to prove.
Considering as we've seen in previous sections, how the human brain can be influenced towards irrational conclusions. We can use reasoning to define the process of arriving at a conclusion, but we need something called the scientific method to refine the stimuli we take in, and the conclusions we arrive at in the 17th century rationalist, or the theory that beliefs are better held upon reason than religious faith was popularized by Rene Descartes and empiricism.
A theory that the best way to know life lies and what is observable was popularized by Francis bacon. Then later hypothetical deductive reasoning, Isaac Newton later in the 18th century, which was the process of crafting a hypothesis or a hypothetical premise that could then be tested in a controlled environment.
Instead of creating a generalization and moving forward, like is required for traditional logical. For instance, the scientific method, reverse engineers, these stances by creating a preliminary theory, then observing trolled and falsifiable experiments to arrive at a working theory. Thus, the scientific method can not be used to arrive at absolute truth, but can be used to arrive at something as close to absolute truth as humanly possible.
So far I say so far here, because there may come a day in the future when we do not need to affirm signifies through the frame of the words that carry them someday, we may be able to directly connect our minds using technology, the entire paradigm of how we share and agree on observations. What change in that moment?
We'll also have to save this for another episode. I cannot tell you how much it hurts to hear people say of scientific theory. Well, that's just a theory. That's a misunderstanding of theory. Conclusions in science are called theories because philosophically it's very hard to absolutely prove something wrong or true.
For example, can we prove using science that there isn't a teapot floating in space. On the other side of the sun, we can use logic to reasonably dismiss this claim. But even submitting that there is a teapot on the other side of the sun would be an example of a hypothesis and therefore open to debate and scrutiny.
We use logic to arrive at premises. We use the scientific method to confirm them building a foundation on materialism or the belief that phenomenon that occur in our universe must be on some level rooted to the physical dimension and therefore measurable gives us something that philosophers had sought for millennia.
A means of the absolute human observation and memory is highly error prone. Quite often, two people recounting the same story. We'll fight bitterly over the accuracy of each other's we're counting. The scientific method is unique in the fact that it yearns to be disproved. An actively rewards descent.
This has made possible thanks to human communication skills and the concept of units of measurement or standardized predetermined quantities that remain the same cross language and culture, a blind Russian scientist, and a deaf Australian scientist will both agree on the length of a kilometer. This is why when I say a theory is falsifiable.
It's a good thing. Science was created on a belief that you should never claim to know more than you can prove, and that everyone working to prove or disprove a hypothesis, we'll be working with the same level of evidence. Material realism is why a hypothesis carries with it. What's known as a burden of proof.
When someone makes a claim about reality using hypothesis, not only are they expected to provide measurements that make evident their claims, but also to open themselves up to academic scrutiny before their hypothesis can be considered a theory. This is called peer review, and one can not receive an advanced degree without partaking in it by design theories that can be reduced and proven using pure mathematics are known as laws.
Like in the example of Newton's first law of thermodynamics. Commonly known the phrase is an object. Motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and direction, less acted upon by an outside force. But this is not how physicists use the formula. The reason this is Newton's law, instead of Newton's theory is because using mathematics, the phenomenon can be predicted with absolute certainty.
For the same reason though evolution is considered a theory and the debate on its validity has been won again and again, over 160 years and counting it is not a law because the concept cannot be reduced to pure mathematics. This makes it falsifiable, but not inherently false as the observations of the phenomenon occur all the same.
And the theory of evolution can be used to predict occurrences with damn near absolute certainty. The end goal of the scientific method is one at shares with logic. Predictability the utility of logic is to arrive at conclusions about the future. Based on assumptions about the past, the utility of the scientific method is to the conclusions about the future based on observations about the present or past, why does all this matter in rhetoric?
Our modern world is built on empiricism. And rationalism, even if it's never been explained to you, nearly everything you interact with on a daily basis is an obsession directed version of logical conclusions and scientific theories. You turn on your car with a reasonable assumption that it will not explode and burst into flames.
It does this thanks to an incredibly complex chain of scientifically proven feats of engineering that have been tested and improved upon for hundreds of years, with the assumption that two plus two will always equal four. The boiling down of assumptions to mathematics is an incredibly powerful human tool.
Your house is built on the assumption that one meter will always equal one meter. And if a day comes where that is not true, we should throw away your tape measure. Not materialism. All of this is to say that if you're going to use conversation and rhetoric to sharpen your ideas, you should make sure that your audience has been presented with all of the evidence, all of the premises, and can agree on all the units of measurement within persuasive narrative premises can sometimes be hidden or implied by other premises.
These extra unspoken logical steps are left for an audience to infer. And our place where ideology can creep in. Think back to my strong man's haberdashery example in the first section, by explaining their process through which they ethically create their hats. They're creating an unspoken premise that buying a hat from them will have less of an environmental impact than their competitors.
They don't say this explicitly. They leave you to infer that through the outlining of their processes, another example, we may all be familiar with. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, the acceptance of this premise on its face and within the context of the world stage implies that since one. Iraq is presumed to hate us and to Iraq has the means to destroy us.
And three, we have the means to destroy Iraq and four, we have the authority as granted by being the world's greatest superpower, quote, unquote, to know this for certain, therefore we have a moral and ethical imperative to destroy before they destroy us. I like this example because it also, I liked the fact that just because an argument may be logically sound.
If it's built on a false premise, it will most likely arrive at a false conclusion. You should keep this in mind when taking in rhetoric and when hanging mission accomplished banners in debates on television, if the scope well, the conversation is constrained. The scope of the conclusions will also be constraint.
If a person is outlining something, they claim to be logical. More important than the conclusion they arrive at is the weighing of the premises used to arrive at said conclusion. For instance, in the United States, black Americans represent 13% of the population and are also responsible for 50% of the crime.
Stop me if you've heard this bullshit before, this has mentioned again and again, as a defensive increased police presence in black American communities. However, this argument is built upon a false premise that can be easily shown. There's an assumption that must be made here, but has never spoken.
Unless you're speaking to a white supremacist, that is that the only underlying correlation between these two numbers is the only other information provided that they are black. This means that there's only two premises. This argument can be built on either. These numbers are correlated, meaning the fact that these people are black is the only reason they're committing more crime.
Of course, this is being a deeply racist presumption or too that there are other factors not being accounted for in the premise. I would posit the fact that poverty correlates to crime rates far more than race does as evidence of the second premise that you do not have enough information. I would also posit that race does tend to correspond to poverty due to historically racist economic policies in the United States.
Therefore, with these two other pieces of information included, we can break down the argument and include its hidden premises and see that it falls flat given all of the information. See the show notes for the data on crime and race. As a brief aside on this example, the racist option of the two readings seems to STEM from a book called the bell curve, which has been largely discredited if not entirely discredited, but I still see its echoes in online debate.
I'll link a debunking on the claims of race and IQ that the book makes in the show notes and hopes that I never have to see this fucking source quoted ever again. Whenever you find that a particular logical outcome doesn't seem to match the premises, you should look at what hidden or assumed premises would allow the logic to reach the outcome than analyze the individual validity of these hidden clams or premises.
Outrageous claims require outrageous evidence. I'd also like to shout out the YouTube channel philosophy too, for this line of thinking I discovered in researching for this episode, I'll also link that in the show notes, you should always strive to be truthful in your actions. If your logo says sound. It will add to your ethos and increase the power of your rhetoric.
Now, let me tell you a story of how logic changed my life, my logos, or how I learned to stop being an idiot accidentally. I had a weird obsession as a child, and I can't really tell you exactly where it came from. I had mentioned this briefly in the, my pathos section, but I used to beg my parents for any book remotely related to science fact.
Zoo books, Nat geo kids, anything with dinosaurs really hell when I was probably about seven years old, my grandfather and I printed off about 500 ornithological descriptions of exotic birds that I tucked into to a binder, and then tuck the binder under my arm. As I went off in search of two cans in his rural California backyard, this contrast sharply with where I was schooled, I attended a private Christian school, which we'll hear go unnamed, but probably wouldn't be too difficult to look up.
From kindergarten to my senior year of high school, I was in what we would have called a non-denial Christian congregation, but was really proud of and all the fantastical thinking that went there within I was a stereotypical church kid. Well, behaved a little quiet and extremely sure that what I had been told was the absolute truth.
This really, it wasn't a problem in my childhood, since I didn't have much interaction with the world outside of my school or my home. Around the time I hit puberty. I remember there being a distinct change in the record, the Rick of the religion, I was no longer the cherub. I was led to believe that I was, I was now a center filled with impurity sexuality in all of its forms was an unfortunate byproduct of these fleshy containers for our souls.
And furthermore, there were certain sexual acts that the omniscient creator of the entire universe. It seemed to be really hung up on starting around eighth grade. I started to be brought up in apologetics or philosophical, biblical debate and defense. This manifested in action. Well classes I had in high school called Bible class, where I in high school was taught things.
The average person, or perhaps not the average American would consider cultish, for example, most modern Christians Genesis as parable as poetry. Like the songs. However, in school it was taught that since there were literal genealogy accounts in the book of Genesis, that must mean the entire book was literal the universe in exactly seven days.
One for sanctified dicking around, we refer to lovingly as the Sabbath, we were taught to read the Bible literally, and then reason backwards from there, for instance, light being created first in the creation myth in Genesis before the stars. Therefore God must eliminate light. And so on. I was taught that the earth was 6,000 years old thousand, literally.
Took tests on it, wrote it down, received a passing grade for writing it down, watched creationist videos about how evolution cannot be true because it invalidates the account of the world in Genesis humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together. At the same time, they even went so far as to explain how Noah took the precaution of loading dinosaur eggs onto the Ark so that they wouldn't eat the other animals.
I just thought that homosexuals were going to hell. As well as every other person of faith, that wasn't lucky enough to be born into Christianity. I very distinctly remember a skipping, the passages, condemning shellfish, and wearing clothes of mixed materials in Leviticus, as well as working on the Sabbath.
Also being punishable by death. God knows we did plenty of fundraisers on Sundays. There were also some particularly interesting philosophical teachings in school, like the waging of a secret campaign to fill the entire us government with Christians. So as to return Israel to the shoes and jumpstart Armageddon, also something called divine command theory, which was used to dismiss the genocide in the Bible.
Good. Actually on the grounds that when God tells you to do something it's good inherently, I believe this is also known as the Nixon defense. Oh, and Muslims are also not allowed to use divine command. In theory, there was so many false readings of scientific fact like evolution was so dismissed on the grounds that micro evolution exists, but macro evolution doesn't this of course ignores the fact that they are exactly the same thing.
If you can see that mutations occur in nature. Well, that's the ballgame. Natural selection is an immediate byproduct of mutations occurring in nature. Woopsy accidentally misinformed, 30 years worth of young minds. Oh, well, not only that, but whenever a student would have doubts about the validity of the teachings, they were treated as though they were sinners for questioning the way of things.
Like only through blind faith, could their peace of mind be returned. We worshiped a God of the gaps. Or anything that science could not prove as law was the working of God. It doesn't take a scientist to see that this ever receding field of divine works as science explains more, more, and more of our reality.
Every single day is probably a bad thing foundation to build a belief system on. Now even today, I still lean towards a belief in the absolute, this is where I actually differ from many of my postmodern contemporaries that quirk in me. I see as a direct byproduct of biblical thinking, where if you're we're stumped, all you need to do is fall back on.
God works in mysterious ways. God was my absolute truth, my big other, and now it's materialism, which is to say that even though our perception of it may be false at times, the thing to unchanging absolute truth in life is the material physical world. And not some being that transcends the physical and whose properties can change depending on who you ask.
The main, everyday difference being that I'll never refer to bone cancer in children as a mysterious, and they would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddling state government and their mandated science classes. Oftentimes I would take a biology class where we would quickly go over as fact.
Only to go the following period to a Bible class that would refute everything I had just learned as conspiracy by secular scientists or Marxist Leninist that Satan had led astray in my head as much as I thought of myself as a good Christian and tried to accept what I was being taught. I could never shake the idea that science itself couldn't be inherently evil.
How could observation of any kind be inherently good or evil? It's just observation right now. Well, best not think about it at home. My father always loved using big words. Later in life. I came to realize that some of them he was using incorrectly, but that sense of the importance of gaining knowledge was ingrained in me from a very early age.
I think this is best objectified in the dusty books that you still litter. My dad's home office. I now suffer from this same tendency. I see a book and through some kind of brain virus I'm led to believe that I can absorb its words. If it just sits on my bookshelf long enough. One of the books that sat next to my dad's office, computer for years was Stephen.
Hawking's a brief history of time. My dad always encouraged me to be curious about the world. So my senior year of high school, after serving the previous year as my school's chaplain, I was told by my English teacher to read and report on a book above my reading level. I did the lazy thing and chose something.
I considered stereotypically smart. And also that I owned already a brief history of time. I did this under an assumption using the same style of reverse logic. I was taught in Bible class. I started from the fact that we were right about everything and reasoned backwards from there. God exists in the exact form I've been taught.
So therefore it doesn't matter what information I take in. I can read the most atheistic, secular Marxist texts, and if God exists, I should always be able to reason my way back to God using observations about the world that he made. Now, quick aside on God and nature, the ability to know there is a God through nature was explained to me as something called general revelation.
That means that even though there are remote tribes in the Amazon that have never heard of the Judeo Christian, God, they could still be condemned to hell for not believing in him. Because according to my school, at least you cannot look at nature without knowing that Jesus specifically is Lord. The reason this came up is because the church had to explain why newborns who die shortly after births.
You'll go to heaven while also justifying missions around the world to convert people, to Christianity. My argument. To this would be if all newborns automatically go to heaven, wouldn't the moral thing be to kill all babies. As soon as they're born, save them all from even the option of going to hell.
Like if you really believe hell existed, that's the moral thing to do. Right. Right. Anyway, since Stephen Hawking's name was. Up amongst the ranks of Carl Sagan and Charles Darwin. And the list of top say tannic charlatans before my English teacher could approve of my book choice. My Bible teacher had to approve of it first.
So I explained my reasoning and she agreed. She saw the potential youth faster in me and approved my book choice. When I say started reading the book, I had imagined that I. A 16 year old high school, senior from the central Valley of California who had never passed algebra two and could not explain the basic points of natural selection or at that point even much more than an object's acceleration due to gravity.
What's going to disprove Stephen Hawking's view of the universe, using nothing more than Bible passages and sheer will of ego. If this sounds absurd to you. Understand that this is the level of confidence that this cult like thinking instills in us. It's true believers. So I began reading the voice in my head, took on, sorry.
Hastick tones. As the concepts entered my mind, it's very easy to feel superior to something you literally don't even have the basic tools to understand. Looking back on this experience, that book is truly a masterpiece and it's a Testament to how brilliant Stephen Hawking was. That he was able to put so eloquently, the advanced theories, he'd spent a lifetime studying with his truly genius level of intellect and record them in a way that even got through to a dullard like me before I was finished with even the first chapter, something stood out in my mind, something mentioned in the book book as a passing thought, but nevertheless, something that spoke to the childhood love of the stars in me.
And that was the distance that the stars were from earth. Even when I would put the book down and walk away, I would go on about my day with those numbers haunting me. Here's why since space is so big, you have to measure it with really big units. In this case, a light year, a light year is the distance that light travels in one year.
So if a star is four light years away, that means it would take a spaceship traveling at the speed of light for entire years to get to that star. Do you see the problem yet? Look up at the night sky. Some of those stars are billions of light years from earth. If earth was only 6,000 years old, how is it that we can see those stars?
We can see and prove how far away the stars are using trigonometry or pure mathematics. If the earth had only been where it is for as long as they said it had the light from a star, a billion light years away would still need. 999,993,994 years to reach us. If we allow for the 6,000 years, since God created the world in six days for nearly a billion more years, we would still see darkness instead of that star.
And yet its light has seemingly already reached and passed us since the Bible says that all the stars were created at the same time. And God is no longer around to be a source of light. How can we see those stars? This kept me awake for days. I had hidden obstacle that dogma and ignorance could not surmount observable truth.
I eventually wrote my book report by plagiarizing some apologetic debates I found online, but the damage had been done. I eventually asked my Bible teacher about this crisis of faith. I was having her explanation was unsatisfactory in a word. Not only did she not even understand the concepts I was explaining to her, her explanation was that God stretched the light.
When he created the universe, my bullshit detector was birthed in this moment. How did she not have an answer that used the same common sense principles as this demonic book? Was this the tempting power of science? Why did it seem more simple than evil? Was it more likely that the people teaching me the Bible were just confused or were the measurements of the world placed for the same reason as dinosaur bones and the ground Satan attempting to mislead me.
This started me down the path to skepticism. I was Ignacio at least from that point on so much so that I tried to instill the same crisis of faith in my peers and teachers during the presentation of my senior high school project, the show ancient aliens had just premiered on the history channel and I latched onto one thing in particular, this allegory to the biblical story.
Of the Nephilim popular with UFO enthusiasts. This old Testament story tells of angels coming to earth and interbreeding with humans to create a race of giants. I shit, you not. This is in the Bible Genesis six, one through four and Ezekiel 32 verse 27. I spent my 15 minute presentation citing bullshit theories from Eric Vandana Kunz chariot gods, which I will not be linking in the show notes.
And then I finished the presentation with. Well, if you believe the Bible is literally true, then you also have to believe in aliens. You already have to accept that beings. Not of this world came in interbred with humans. So as crazy as everything on this show sounds. How much crazier is it than the Bible.
Really? I received an a for that project cause refusing my claim was, would also mean refuting the Bible. This is typically considered by theologians to be a no-no, which the judges have by project we're not ready to deal with. It was one of the best grades I received in my entire schooling career. I was not however recommended for the award for best project, despite receiving one of the best grades in the class.
In my mind, this again, prove the irrefutable city of logic. They hated what I had to say and still had to pass me. I didn't need to be a magician or a scientist. I could use my own reasoning to uncover truth. We're at the very least better understand when I was being lied to too, in a way, ironically, not the thinking of Martin Luther when he sparked the Protestant revolution that through the classically liberal idea of autonomy, we can decipher meaning ourselves.
When I got into college, my roommate was a devout atheist. Through him. I read Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Lauren Strauss, Sam Harris, you name it. I figured I'd been lied to for so long that I needed to not only read atheist teachings, but actively anti religious teachings with the same level of zealotry had when I was a Bible Thumper who hated Muslims.
For pretty much the same reason as I now hated Christians looking back on this, I didn't change minds with this attitude. And it took me far too long to acknowledge that even though logos is powerful, it's only one part of the rhetorical triangle. If you can't reach people's hearts with what you're saying, why exactly are you saying it?
Logic as a concept was devised to be a tool to liberate the individual discourse, necessitates active listeners, the seeking of listeners implies a willingness to change mine. And to have your mind change, you should be changing people's minds out of empathy, not some degree looted sense of ego. I pause it.
That logic can fill that structural vacuum in the mind that religion tends to fill faith can be so dangerous sometimes, but it can also be a great sense of comfort in people. If you can't inspire with logic, you'll never change. Anyone's mind. You won't make any friends in the process. Either. There is a place for spirituality and discourse, even if you're a materialist, because after all it is part of human behavior, our humanity is the commonality that transcends all walks of life and your eternal goal.
Should be to improve the experience of any and all on the walk of life. This section is dedicated to Aaron Powers. It changed my life friend, blessings, wherever you are,
the wrap up or so long. And thanks for all the jargon that brings us to the end of our little rump. If you've made it this far, you sincerely have my deepest thanks or my deepest apologies. Whichever is most applicable. I just want to briefly recap one last time. What exactly I was doing in my personal stories in case it wasn't clear in the ethos section.
I told you about my work history. Yes. But more than that, I demonstrated my willingness to jump into new topics. And I did that. Without necessarily saying I was just telling a story. As I told him the story, you begin to me as a little more credible. Hopefully. In the pathos section by reading someone else's words, whom I love very much gave you a glimpse into me as a person, without any potential bias I may have for myself.
And hopefully made you feel something after all this information has faded from your memory. How I made you feel in that section will likely remain then finally in walking you through my Exodus from religion, pardon the pun I showed you the method through which my mind works. Had I not included any of the preliminary explanations or definitions of the show or what I was going to talk to you about, these stories likely would have still carried the weight of the show.
This is how you apply the rhetorical triangle to something you create. Now before we end this thing, let's look at two last examples. First, how to quantify incoming verbal rhetoric. And second, how to craft outward nonverbal rhetoric. Remember incoming rhetoric can also take the shape of nonverbal communication.
First, a hypothetical presidential speech president straw man walks to the podium. The ideology has already started. They're surrounded by symbology and the presidential seals, as well as all the logos being rendered on screen. The reporters called them, sir, or ma'am not by their name. He or she most likely also wears an archetypically masculine suit, which validates a hierarchical power structure.
All of this is meant to generate ethos. You may disagree with the president, but the reverence of the position itself. And the way it is held up by society demands, unconscious ethos, like a stop sign. You obey without thinking the president fields questions to show that they care about the will of the people.
Even if the questions are dismissed, though, they may read from a teleprompter. They will occasionally move off script. Even if this is still scripted, this gives you a sense that underneath all of the pomp and circumstance, there are a person like you, who still thinks off the cuff, they will make appeals to the nation you live in.
They'll tell you that our nation's goals are just, and that there are forces out in the world that would see us destroyed. They may justify these claims with evidence. But they will rarely qualify or quantify said evidence during the speech, perhaps exclaiming some platitude about greatness to pivot, to a different subject.
They'll talk about jobs and the economy, but will not explain how these numbers affect you specifically. They'll usually create a straw man or a building up of a nonexistent person that they'll then proceed to argue against. They will also certainly not explain that. Even speaking within the context of a capitalist system bypasses the part of your mind that is meant to ask is this normal?
Or is this the way that things are supposed to be capitalism is the stop sign that you obey without thinking it's the predetermined ideology that you accept before you start looking for deeper, meaning, keep this in mind when you're decoding things like movies for meaning that yes, there's a literal story.
And then underneath that, there may be a symbolic story. But the true ideology lies in what you accept unconsciously before the movie even begins. You're bombarded in this example with powerful ideology, that is to make you feel equally fearful and therefore complacent so that you do not panic. But still go to work on Monday due to your belief in a system, the ideology does not always stop after the speech ends.
The new station may bring on experts. Who've likely been schooled or received their expert credentials from entities funded by the same organizations that fund the news networks themselves, the experts that they bring on, although differing in opinion, slightly. Well, almost always all have views well within the confines of what the network deems to be quote unquote, acceptable dissonance.
This conversation then gets into the territory of media propaganda, but I'll save that for another episode. When I discuss Noam Chomsky's manufacturing consent for our final nonverbal example, let's imagine taking a photograph as I usually do in my spare time. You're in a cornfield and CEO. I don't know.
A straw man, the logos of your photo would likely come from the composition or the technical aspects like ISO depth of field, et cetera. Your ethos would come likely from your previous body of work or any surrounding work. This photo was being presented within the context of, in this specific example, this makes pathos Tripoli important.
You prepare to take the photo. The image being rendered is in the shape of a man. But the man is hollow. The scarecrow was used as an image of fear to scare away the crows, a symbol for death and decay. You notice the field has recently been harvested, but there are still crows around one lands and begins to eat from the ground.
Another lands on the scarecrow, you take the image upon seeing the image. The introspective viewer will see symbols of death. The crows overtaking and pecking away at the hollow fearful symbol of a man, the scarecrow and all of that lies upon what used to be a field for nourishing mint and life rendered in black and white.
This completely hypothetical image. I just conjured in my head would look fantastic. I think if only it were so easy. But that's, I think a good example of an artistic medium that relies heavily on the symbolism of pathos. One can probably also imagine a selfie taken by a Kardashians that gets hundreds of thousands of times the attention of the scarecrow photo.
This is because of the Kardashians, immense, uh, ethos.
If you're like me. You want to influence the minds of the people around you? For the better, you don't have to get a degree to speak on philosophy or economics. That's not a deal breaker in the modern age as exemplified by my own show as wrong as I may be on some subjects. There's plenty of expert sources out there for you to absorb and relate.
Just don't pretend to have credentials you don't and always give credit where credit is due. Remember a lot of what makes you credible is your susceptibility to reproach. So don't be afraid to speak your mind when challenged or to change your mind when presented with new ideas, never forget the passion that drives you after all the source digging and squabbling has done.
The thing that sticks with people is how you made them feel. So make them feel powerful and finally, any position worth having is worth, fully exploring, be as discerning about your own positions as others are, and always be aware of premises. Someone may not explicitly include in their argument. No one pillar is more important than the others.
You need all three in order to protect yourself and help others see clearly in a world that constantly has a bridge to sell you. Aren't you glad there's an anti salesmen out there.
all of us. There is a yearning to be recognized. That's the common denominator throughout all the pillars of the rhetorical triangle. We seek to persuade because in hearing others, we hear ourselves. And in guiding others, we guide ourselves. Remember to please, please comment and subscribe. If you like the show, I hope you come away with this, knowing that you have within yourself, the authority to reject the masters, who would enslave you the logic to reject the gods, who would damn you and the heart.
To reject the rugged individualism of our modern society and to cultivate empathy, no gods, masters or clout necessary. See you next time.